With the exorbitant cost of daycare, Author, Blogger, and Comedian Chris Illuminati decided that he would become a stay-at-home dad after his first child was born.
“It made more fiscal sense to stay home with my kid child than to collect a paycheck, only to hand it over to a daycare facility to watch my young son,” he told Scary Mommy.
Before his wife went back to work, she gave him a long verbal list of things he had to do each day when she was away.
He joked, “I better write this down.” And he did. With some Post-It notes and a Sharpie marker.
“As a joke (because I’ve never taken anything in life seriously), I wrote down even the simplest of tasks and pinned it to my bulletin board,” he wrote on his blog, Message With a Bottle. “I forgot all about the note. I also forgot to change the baby.”
The notes served as a source of humor for him and his wife, or his “Permanent Roommate” as he likes to call her.
That was until a local news outlet wrote a post on his blog, Message With a Bottle, which subsequently went viral and got more than 6 million views.
It was later shared with sites like The Huffington Post, Good Morning America, and so on. Now Illuminati has more than 67,000 Facebook followers who enjoy his hilarious posts.
“The notes immediately struck a nerve with readers,” Illuminati explains. “I received emails, Facebook messages, Tumblr comments and tweets from men and women, parents of young children, grown children and parents.”
The Illuminati family’s recent trip to Disney spurred a whole bunch of new hilarious notes that most parents can relate to.
“It was fun but literally like having a second job,” he said of the trip.
Even grandparents enjoy Illuminati’s blog.
“I am retired and don’t have grandchildren so your blog gives me joy without the need to spoil grandchildren,” commented Arlene on his website. “I’m on a limited budget! Keep writing and take us all through their teenage years.”
Message With a Bottle has been going strong for about seven years.
“We tend to forget as parents that we’re going through something in the moment that 5 million other parents did too,” he told ABC News. “It’s kind of like we all share in each other’s pain, misery, joy — there’s just a familiarity to it.”
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